“Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities and compelling nostalgia.” (Adam Philiips, On Balance)

Churchill said that the Balkans produce more history than it could consume. The Croats, the Serbs, the Ottomans, all had their periods of glory. Religion accentuates the differences: respectively, Christian, Orthodox and Muslim. The Paris Peace Conference after World War I ignored reality on the ground. World War II refashioned boundaries, and then more recently the Dayton Agreement cobbled a peace deal together. All imperfect. Politics is local, and family massacres are remembered and revenged. Pick your poison: Srebrenica for the Bosnians; Jasenovc for the Serbs; Vukovar for the Croats.

Matthew Palmer’s “The Wolf of Sarajevo” is a political thriller that imagines another slide into the Balkan abyss. Here Serbian nationalists would undo Dayton and persecutes the Bosniaks again.

The author is a U.S. State Department foreign officer who had been posted to Belgrade during the height of the Bosnian war. He knows the venue. Although heroic, as political thrillers may be, the novel is grounded in the history and politics of the region. It is fast paced and entertaining.

Unsurprisingly, a State Department official, operating somewhat rogue, is the hero. The State Department and the U.S. Defense departments its related agencies view each other with some disdain. This is evidenced in the novel, although bureaucracies and politicians are the principal villains. To achieve success, operating outside the lines is requisite. This is a tradition in this genre. There are no James Bond types, but the novel errs on the side of fiction. It is meant to be a fun read and is.

What we have in Pascale Kramer’s “Autopsy of a Father” is a failure to communicate on a familiar and societal level. Set currently in and around St. Etienne in south central France near Lyon, it was a region near the center of the Vichy government during World War II. Not a liberal region, the father, Gabriel, was a liberal journalist, whose defense of two local boys who murdered an immigrant from Comoros, is reviled by his former colleagues, and quietly supported by his neighbors. He is found dead, purportedly a suicide, soon after his estranged daughter and deaf grandson visit him. The daughter, an intellectual and social failure in the eyes of her egotistical and narcissistic father, is divorced from a Balkan Muslim, who unexpectedly shows up for the funeral preparations, along with the father’s controlling ex-wife from a locally superior economic and political class, and her brother. There is some financial issue about a Degas that has gone unaccounted for from the estate.

Death can bring out the worst in families, particularly when it is dysfunctional in life. The lack of communication breeds distrust, and communication feeds the flame.

This short novel starts a little slow, but rapidly becomes a page-turner. Ms. Kramer builds and maintains the tension throughout, with the politics of prejudice being an undercurrent. It indirectly raises the question whether prejudice more easily evolves when one bears the brunt of immigration, then those who unaffectedly theorizes about the impact of immigration on local communities. It is unclear, whether the victim was in France illegally or was an African legally living in predominantly white rural France. It is unclear if he was Muslim as most are. The murder was clearly unprovoked and there is no mention about what impact immigration had on the community, other than the resulting prejudice. These questions are left for the reader.

The prose is in service of the story and character development. A third-party narration, the novel is told from the daughter’s perspective. I have read a number of publications of Bellevue Literary Press. They tend to publish good works.

I was in Prague last summer. It is a beautiful city. It is home to one of the best zoos in the world and I knew nothing about it. It is the second most visited place in Prague. If you view the website for the zoo it has pictures of free roaming giraffes and a history of the zoo. The history mentions nothing about the subject of J.M. Ledgard’s historical fiction debut novel “Giraffe.”

Mr. Ledgard is a journalist with “The Economist” who is a person with diverse interests and experience. Born in the Shetland Islands and educated in England and America, as a political and war correspondent he has been posted to Czechoslovakia and East Africa, and is a supporter of Africa and environmentalism.

The novel “Giraffe” uncovers the extermination of the largest herd of animals held in captivity. It occurred at the Prague zoo while Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule and was deliberately kept silent, up until this novel. There is no mention of it on the Prague Zoo’s website, even today.

For anyone traveling to the Czech Republic it would be a great companion as it blends, local geography, history and local culture with the story. There is an under-current of anti-Communism throughout the book, mostly from a social perspective. The Czechs are symbolically within their own zoo under the Communist rule.

The weakness in the novel is in the first two short chapters in which the author uses one of the giraffes as a narrator. Although there is a multiplicity of narration throughout the novel, each providing individual perspective of the same event, these first two chapters don’t work. A good editor should have noted this for a debut writer of fiction. The prose and plot apart from this are strong throughout. The writing and dialogue is clear and realistic. Minimal use of adjectives is consciously made.

The principal narrator is a scientist whose knowledge of hemodynamics and the biology of giraffes is imparted throughout the novel.

” I am more concerned … with the viscosity of giraffe blood, five time thicker than water, with a multiplication of crimson stars, in better distribution of oxygen, with jugular veins several centimeters in diameter, stoppered with one way valves, in such a way as to regulate the flow from the head when it is lifted from the ground. There are thirty-two giraffes here, each with a wonder net hidden from view. When a giraffe splays its legs and sets down its head to drink, the pressure on its cranial vasculature triples. The giraffe’s cerebral blood vessels are too thin-walled to constrict against it. But for the wonder net, the giraffe would collapse, as cosmonauts do when certain g-force is applied. It is the wonder net that keeps the living form of giraffes pushed up, even to resemble creatures from a world of lesser gravity. When the head goes down, its endless shunts and meanders spread elastically across the base of the cranium, absorbing the flow that rushes in through the carotid artery.”

From the ecological role giraffes play on the plains of Africa and their depiction in art and by historical cultures, to the social condition of life in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, this novel bleeds information and perspective. The author later wrote a well-received novel “Submergence” which ranges from war, politics, espionage, to oceanography, with a venue in Somalia. It would not surprise me if the author has done work with MI6.

The author dedicates the “Giraffe” to the late Czech photographer and avant-garde film maker Alexandr Hackenschmied.

This is a novel worth reading even if you are not traveling to the Czech Republic. For me this novel is an example of why I love my library. I go to it with a long list of TBR books and then discover something on the shelf I otherwise would never have read.

“Lenin found music depressing. Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music. Khrushchev despised music. Which is the worst for a composer?”

Julian Barnes’ does not answer this question in his biographical fiction “The Noise of Time”, which examines Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich’s life and travails in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich is a facility for Barnes to question whether Art will ultimately conquer Power; the latter presumably being more fleeting despite its repetitiveness.

“What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves- the music of our being- which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.”

You can consider four personality types: believer; collaborator; critic; and martyr. Barnes’, or at least Shostakovich as interpreted by Barnes, viewed liberal critics of the Soviet Union, who criticized outside the reach of an authoritarian regime, to be no different from the autocrats who required propaganda from their artists. Shostakovich loved Stravinsky for his music, but thought no more of him and Nabokov for their criticism than he did of Stalin. Shostakovich, did not believe in the Soviet system, but did not martyr himself. According to Barnes’ his cowardice, protection of family, materialism, or wish to be left alone to be a musician, made him a collaborator.

This is not a particularly well written novel. It is principally based on Elizabeth Wilson’s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. There is no real discussion or analysis of Shostakovich’s music. It could be read as non-fiction, except some of its rare dialogue seems unrealistic. Shostakovich who fears the Stalin has ordered his death purportedly receives a call from Stalin requesting that he attend the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York. The dialogue has Shostakovich giving Stalin one excuse after another why he cannot attend: he is sick; he can’t fly; he does not have a tail-suit; that his music is not being played in the Soviet Union. It reads like a conversation between a teacher and a young student who has forgotten his homework. Worse, there is very little imagined dialogue in the novel. It is a narration as if it were non-fiction.

“The Testament of Mary” which I reviewed, imagined the cruxification of Christ from the vantage point of his mother, Mary. Colm Toibin’s biographical fiction, demonstrates imagination, not recounting of a secondary source work of non-fiction. As a character, Barnes’ did not create in my mind the fear of death that Shostakovich would have had waiting outside his apartment in anticipation of being taken away, tortured and killed.

I can’t subscribe to Art being immune from subjectivity and control outside of political power. There may be universality in creation for the sake of creation (without recognition), but that is individualistic and will not aggregate to be a “whisper of history”.

Julian Barnes has written better, and will write better than “The Noise of Time”.

An imagined village that historically was on the trade route from Cairo to Damascus. Once ruled by the Mamluks, today is in Gaza.

“A river, brimming with God’s assortment of fish and flora, can through Beir Daras, bringing blessings and carrying away village waste, dreams, gossip, prayers, and stories, which it emptied into the Mediterranean just north of Gaza. The water flowing over rocks hummed secrets of the earth and time meandered to the rhythms of crawling, hopping, buzzing, and flying lives.”

The author, Susan Abulhawa, is a political activist whose family immigrated to the U.S. after the Six Day war with Israel. Her parents had lived in East Jerusalem, initially moving to Kuwait. She reportedly spent some time in foster care, and the character Nur perhaps reflects some of her experience. The story is a saga of a Palestinian family displaced after Israel’s War of Independence, told through the eyes of women. It is a story of family and traditional Palestinian values, in part, in contrast to American values and those of richer Palestinians. The underlying theme is of unprovoked displacement, occupation, and struggle to regain their freedom and village of Beir Daras. The novel begins with a recitation of the Israel-Arab/Palestinian conflict and the rise of Hamas, who the author supports.

“Declassified documents, obtained years later, revealed the chilling precision with which Israel calculated the calorie intake of 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza to make them go hungry, but not starve.” The author’s statement is based on a April 15, 2006 article in the Observer section of The Guardian, and attributable to Dov Weissglass, then an advisor to the then Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert :

“‘The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,’ he said. The hunger pangs are supposed to encourage the Palestinians to force Hamas to change its attitude towards Israel or force Hamas out of government.”

The authenticity of the quote and its context were later called into question (see https://bbcwatch.org/tag/dov-weisglass/ ). Without the undercurrent theme I might have been able to enjoy the story more, but its historical inaccuracies and unbalance, seem aimed at propaganda for recruits. Given that the author lives in Pennsylvania and did not bear the suffering that those in Gaza have experienced, this is bothersome to me. She admits that the venue is derivative from Ramzy Baroud’s book My Father Was a Freedom Fighter. To her credit she is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine.

The story never demonstrates the starvation and deprivation that I expected it to. The families do not have all that they want and do suffer from bombings, but no family member is ever without food nor has diet limitations. They have periodic celebrations. It does not feel like a pogrom, if that was the author’s intent. Perhaps this was edited out. Perhaps the intent was not to directly create a political novel, but to do so indirectly. The preface and epilogue only intermittently reflect the novel and might have been omitted.

The more literary writing reflected in the initially quoted paragraph of this review is never repeated. This novel is principally story-telling. The characters are well-developed, particularly the matriarch of one of the family lines, Atiyeh m. Nazmiyeh, and Nur a granddaughter of a related family line, who is American born, and suffers in foster care before emigrating to Gaza. The interplay between these two characters and Nazmiyeh’s daughter, Alwan, is interesting, as Western American women (and Westernized upper class Palestinian women) values are unacceptable to retained traditional values. The atomic, individualized world of Americans, is rejected by the communal, familial orientation of traditional Arab (and Persian) cultures. The author is reflects the values of her characters, and is honest in doing so.

As this is principally a women’s novel, only the stories of a few males by marriage, birth, or relationship, are told. Nazmiyeh’s eleven sons are not part of the tale. Are they part of the resistance or are they merely trying to earn a living to survive? Perhaps the author can write a sequel based on their stories given her political activism.

If you are a supporter of Hamas you may like this novel or may find it too mainstream. Personally I am troubled by an agenda that keeps sending young people and families to their death, rather than to try to coexist and build a better life for those which it purportedly represents (and did at one point).

In the last book in Robert Harris’ Ancient Rome Trilogy, Dictator, captures the House of Cards that was Rome in the period beginning in the last half of 1 BC. The Dictators are Gaius Julius Caesar, Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius) and Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian (aka Augustus), following the failures of the first (Caesar, Pompey and Marcus Crassus) and second (Octavian, Antony and Marcus Lepidus) Triumvirates. The novel is drawn from Cicero’s secretary Tiro imagined biography of Cicero during the final fifteen years of his life. It is principally political fiction, focusing on Cicero as statesman and lawyer and not as philosopher. The focus is on Cicero, the Republican savior. The biography is after Cicero served as Consul and instituted martial law to avert the overthrow of the Republic and his assassination by the Catiline conspirators. In an ironic twist, it is Caesar who argues for life imprisonment of the conspirators, fearing the precedent that Cicero and the Senate would set by instituting the death penalty without any judicial intervention.

History is replete with familiar and political intrigue, so the backdrop for this historical fiction makes the novel a political thriller. The prose is modern prose. This is not literary fiction. The intent is to reveal the history and the politics in a fast paced novel, and in this it succeeds. The historical base for the biography is Plutarch’s Parallel Livers (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Cicero*.html

Plutarch drew upon the discovery of Cicero’s letters. Dictator adds imagined dialogue to the history. As with Plutarch’s Lives, this novel is also a study of human characters on a world stage.

The novel is a reminder that hypocrisy is a function of power. It would be an excellent companion to a secondary school course covering ancient history. If you enjoy history or politics, you will find it entertaining.